This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 4th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

When you or I think about helping the poorest people in the world, we typically think about donating

to charitable groups that provide relief from the ravages of poverty.

But that kind of thinking and those kinds of quote unquote help for the poor might actually

be extending many of the problems that contribute to poverty.

Mark Weber is a co-producer of the film Poverty Inc.

We spoke today.

The starting point in the film was, I think I have to look to our leadership,

which is our director of the film Michael Matheson Miller.

It's a very interesting background. He did a master's in international development in

Japan and lived there for five years, studied international business in Europe and lived there.

And then he actually taught as a philosophy professor in Latin America.

And I think in this film, you see the convergence of those three, the market economics, development and also philosophy.

And what he describes is his experience in Japan was being overwhelmed by this sense in the development community, quote unquote, of this

social engineering mindset.

This very top, this top down power structure that really on a more philosophical level turns the poor into the objects of our

charity and sentimentality.

And I think that the driving conversation that we kept having when we were in the beginning stages of this piece

were always stemmed from that starting point of the human person and then

rippled out into what is the ecosystem look like that facilitates human

flourishing and what we began to realize is that a lot of what is done in the

charity and aid world actually undermines the project of creating that healthy ecosystem.

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